


Rituals

by terribad



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: F/M, Marijuana
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-09
Updated: 2013-06-09
Packaged: 2017-12-14 09:20:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/835295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terribad/pseuds/terribad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tarrlok attempts to teach Korra how to get in touch with her spiritual side.  Just a quick, little ficlet for fun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rituals

Korra felt hazy; her mind adrift yet caught in the slowly moving sands of time on the floor of Tarrlok’s living room and the two of them, Tarrlok sunken heavily into an overly soft-looking leather couch, wreathed in smoke.  She’d never done something like this before, only having some vague remembrance of her parents occasionally performing some kind of smoking ritual after they thought she’d gone to sleep when she was still but a tiny girl. 

The pungent smell was familiar and warm, of course, heavy and permeating in the air like a living childhood memory, but the White Lotus had curiously omitted it from her lessons.   It made sense to her, thinking the ritual had nothing to do with her duties of being the Avatar, even though Katara herself kept mum about the activity.

She’d almost forgotten it by now, of course, until Tarrlok casually asked her one night if she partook in seaweed and would like to join him for a smoking session after a successful Equalist raid.  After laughing cheerfully at her confused and oblivious answer, the whisking away to his home that followed was what caused her to end up on his living room floor (she swore her butt was trying to fuse with the ludicrously soft fur rug). 

“It’s a Water Tribe tradition,” she remembers him explaining as he passed her a glass pipe unlike any she’d seen before, a long wide mouth flaring generously toward the bottom, a reservoir of water from which a little straw poked out and cradled the precious herb in the mouth of a carved ivory wolf’s head.  It seemed so extravagant compared to the small, hand-held pipes she’d seen on the streets and in restaurants.  “It’s called a water pipe, for what I should hope are obvious reasons.”

He showed her how to hold it, and insisted on lighting it for her (she protested of course, seeing that she was her _own_ lighter, thank you very much, but she got tired of him swatting her hand away) and told her to put her mouth on the wide lip of the pipe and inhale as much as she could.  Any skepticality she held about the ritual dissipated, and so did time itself, when she first swallowed down a big cloud of smoke and hacked it back up within seconds.  Korra vaguely recalls the two of them passing the strange pipe back and forth before turning on the radio and tuning in to a music station, and then…

“So what’s this seaweed stuff actually called, anyway?”

Tarrlok lifts his head, a laborious and sluggish movement, as he regards her for a few dazed moments.  He makes a face, a mixture of embarrassment and reluctance, before answering in the smallest voice he could manage.  “…Northern Water Tribe Thunderfuck.”

Korra laughs, leaning towards him and holding a hand up to her ear. “Northern… Water Tribe… Thunder-what?  I couldn’t hear that last part.”

Tarrlok sighs like the weight of the world is upon his chest.  To have to say this in the company of someone so young…   “Northern Water Tribe Thunderfuck.  That’s the actual name of the plant.”

“Northern Water Tribe Thunderfuck,” she repeats, settling back onto the floor in satisfaction.  “I take it that was named after a tradition, too.”

“…Probably,” he says, bashfully covering his face.  He wasn’t supposed to use such coarse language around someone who he pegged as impressionable as a baby penguin-otter, much less language that vaguely invoked a very shameful and secret attraction to her…

Korra grins like a shark. “Then you’ll have to show me that one too, Mr. Traditional.”


End file.
